CLEVELAND, OHIO—The least surprising moment in the 2016 presidential campaign came down on Friday night, just in time to stop the ceaseless vamping on cable television (Note to Chris Matthews: Using Hugh Hewitt to kill time simultaneously kills your audience, in some cases literally): Hillary Rodham Clinton will run for president with Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia.

I will get my personal feelings out of the way first. I am overjoyed. Over Tim Kaine? Hell, no. I am overjoyed because my senior senator will remain my senior senator, ya greedy bastids.

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OK, now for the rest of you.

It's a good pick. It's a solid pick. It's the kind of pick that Bill Clinton made in 1992 and Barack Obama made in 2008. It's nowhere near as risky a pick as John F. Kennedy made in 1960. It's not the kind of weird pick that Richard Nixon made in 1968, or the kind of misguided pick that Al Gore made in 2000. It's not the kind of process-of-elimination, who-will-hold-my-straitjacket pick that the opposing party made this week. In fact, I'm more concerned that my judgment on such matters has been so warped by the political wild kingdom I experienced in here that HRC could have chosen to run with a cup of warm cocoa and I might have applauded until my palms bled.

The most intriguing part of the pick to me is not that Kaine speaks Spanish. (Geez, TV people, enough with that noise. It's not like he learned differential calculus on the back of a coal shovel.) What's intriguing is that he learned it as a Jesuit missionary in Honduras, taking a year off from Harvard Law School to work with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. This shows a commitment more to the Catholicism of Papa Francesco than to that of the retro Papist opposition. And, seriously, does anyone doubt the presidential candidate's dedication to the constitutional right of choice? I seriously doubt that Tim Kaine is going to go rogue on this issue. And, besides, the party itself has left the whole personally-opposed-but-OK dodge far behind. The Supreme Court is one vote away from a solid pro-choice majority and, even skating one justice down, it's pushing back hard against the SLAPP suit strategy employed by several states. Nothing Tim Kaine can possibly do will reverse that.

Trade is more problematic. He did vote to fast-track the awful TPP deal, and the optics on that are not good, but they only appear seriously bad if you take He, Trump's blathering about trade deals seriously and, therefore, think enough progressives believe that bushwah to make a dent in the Democratic base in November. I don't. We'll see. Otherwise, he may be boring, but he's not timid. He fought tobacco in a tobacco state, and coal in a mining state and, in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, he fought for gun-control in a state that has more than its share of NRA members. As Ari Berman pointed out on the electric Twitter machine after Kaine's announcement on Friday night, Kaine was fighting for open housing in Richmond freaking Virginia when He, Trump was refusing to rent to African Americans in NYC. The fact remains that if, on the basis of his record, Tim Kaine is considered a centrist, then the center of the Democratic party has moved considerably to the left since HRC's husband first ran for president.

The obvious downside is that it puts a Senate seat in play in a deeply purple, deeply vital state, and that problem was seriously exacerbated by another event that took place on Thursday, far from the convention in Cleveland or the rallies in Florida. In April, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe signed executive orders restoring the voting rights to some 200,000 Virginians who had completed their excursions through the criminal justice system. On Friday, three months to the day from McAuliffe's announcement and only a few hours before HRC called Kaine to ask him to join the ticket, the Virginia Supreme Court blew that up, issuing a 4-3 decision that invalidated McAuliffe's executive orders and, according to calculations done by Berman in The Nation, thereby taking away the voting rights of nearly a quarter of the state's African American electorate. The glass is half-full if you believe that Tim Kaine is strong enough to keep Virginia in the Clinton column. The glass is half-empty if you believe that, not only can he not do that, but also that with this decision, neither can whatever Democrat runs for Kaine's Senate seat. The Virginia court's decision is the real joker in this deck.

I expect the usual suspects to be dissatisfied. I expect the usual suspects to raise a kind of hell for a couple of days. I expect the usual suspects who cover the usual suspects to try and make a Trump-Cruz blood feud out of Sanders-Clinton over this decision. I expect that all of this is wrong. Anybody who lived in Cleveland this past week would feel the same. I don't mind looking both ways when I cross the street for a while.